Street Fighter (Europe version)
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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You are Ryu, a Street Fighter. Your goal is to travel to 5 countries (Japan, USA, England, China and Thailand) and beat 2 enemies at each of them. Many of these characters, such as Adon, Gen, and Birdie, are later seen in the Street Fighter Alpha series.

After each country you will have the chance to get additional points in a little bonus round, a feature seen later in most Street Fighter games. 

The final boss in the game is Sagat, who is the second to the last boss in Street Fighter 2. The goal is to become the greatest fighter in the world. As with most tournament fighting games once you have defeated the boss the game will reset and start from the beginning with a harder difficulty level. 

It is possible to start a two player game but there will be only one fight (between the two players) which will determine who will travel the globe to fight the computer controlled opponents.

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Review

Before the Street Fighter franchise became known for the world-beating franchise that spent far too long to be able to count to three that it is today, the first Street Fighter arcade game was probably seen on as a mildly interesting duel-based beat 'em up that, depending on the version, came with two different button setups -- the one with one button for punch and kick each, but with pressure sensitive pads and the one that had six buttons, three for different strength punches and kicks each. (The latter was meant to replace the first, as punch-sensitive pads suffered the downside of becoming worn down to the point of being unusable in a too-short amount of time.) 

Click to zoom!

The Commodore 64 conversion of Street Fighter brings an interesting conundrum to the table, though: at what point does a halfassed conversion job make the most economical sense? I can understand unleashing the turd that was the Commodore version of Street Fighter II on the world, because by that time, the Street Fighter franchise had grown to become a juggernaut, which meant that people would buy it on that strength alone and the vain hope that the Commodore version wouldn't be complete ass. Compared to that, I don't really see how the original Street Fighter would warrant something like that, because while the arcade version wasn't necessarily bad, it wasn't all that great either, except with the possible notoriety that something skirting-the-edge-of-the-law like street fighting is. 

Not that any of this really matters in the end, because the UK contribution to the franchise was a complete and utter disaster. GO!, under the coding skills of Tiertex (who is also responsible for the Commodore version of Rolling Thunder, and that really says it all, doesn't it?) was never known for bringing good conversions of arcade games to the table, and, in fact, it wouldn't surprise me if their version of Street Fighter was what eventually brought them to bankruptcy due to nobody ever wanting to hire them to do Commodore 64 game ever again.... Except they're still around, apparently. Maybe. The only parts of the game that doesn't look terrible -- and I'm talking the kind of terrible that can even make the simplistic and eye-stingingly colored stages of Impossible Mission look like soothing watercolor paintings by comparison -- is the stages for Japan and Thailand, which does at least look somewhat representable. The stage for the Chinese warrior look especially terrible, not as much in presentation, but in what it looks like with the poor Commodore's limited selection of colors. Though let it not be said that I don't think the Commodore 64 could have done better -- it is, after all, home to some startingly beautiful games for its time. Just go take a look at games like Flimbo's Quest or Armalyte. Hell, even the somewhat chaotic designs of Escher's games, like Turrican or Katakis/Denaris are games that show what the Commodore can do graphically. 

It becomes even worse when you take a look at the fighters. Tiertex tried replicating the size of the characters in the arcade game by stretching the sprites vertically, which ends up making all of them look blocky and coarse.... to the point where the worst of the stages drowns them out completely, making it hard to see what's going on. From what I could gather, the game did at least try to make your opponents fight like they did in the arcades, with their oddball individual moves, but you will not easily see this when the game looks like someone dunked their face in a bucket of paint and sneezed all over the canvas. I've given games grief for looking terrible before, but Jesus Christ! Bionic Commando wasn't the prettiest game either, but you were never truly lost in the Jackson Pollock of the gaming world. 

And the controls are just the worst: in an attempt to replicate the variable strength attacks, the length of time you hold the button is what decides the attack power, but good luck hitting your opponent with that, seeing as they're all jumping around as if someone shoveled a large heap of fire ants down their pants. I don't necessarily expect fighters to stand completely still, but the only real pattern I could deduce from every single fighter I came across is them moving around erratically and trying to keep their distance, which gets even more hilarious, given that only two of your opponents have projectile attacks. And even worse, the game seems unable to defend itself against your "just crouch and continuously do the spinning kick" tactic until you get to Sagat, your final opponent. (Who will just projectile you in the face until you go down.) Sure, it's probably possible to win using regular fighting, but given the spastic behavior of everyone, that's more of a crapshoot. To really twist the knife, each time you win against an opponent -- and to do so, you have to fight them at least twice; the game does the "best of three" thing -- you'll see a screen of the character stretched even more and a text dump that goes something like "wow, you're strong. But remember; there are more guys just like you around the world". They might as well have gone "Golly gee, that was a lot of fun, wasn't it? Wanna do that all over again?" because... well, that's what you do. When you defeat Sagat, you are unceremoniously dumped back at the beginning again, so I can only assume the game never really ends until you kill off your character in despair. In summarum, someone out there has a pretty twisted view of what "fun" is. 

Click to zoom!

And what puzzles me the most of all is the multiload. What is it about this game that takes up so much space when everything looks so ugly? International Karate managed to put in two different and very gorgeous backgrounds and have two even larger character perform incredibly well-animated fights in a single load. Granted, the two characters were basically color-coded palette swaps, but even so... And there's the tournament version (or whatever it was called) of Exploding Fist II, which had no less than FOUR different (and nice-looking) backgrounds to go with the equally large characters you played as that, while also being sort of sprite-swap-ish, had individual looks too. Hell, even the original Way of the Expoding Fist had several, better looking backgrounds than Street Fighter. Oh, but you can turn the multiload off. "Really?" you might say? Well, you can... if you don't mind fighting the same two characters over and over and over and over and over again, which begs the question: Why would anyone want to DO this?! WHY?! Wasn't the everlasting loop of terrible fights bad enough when there was at least some small sense of variation? Oh, but there's a two player mode too, where you can play this game against one of your friends. That brings Ryu's buddy Ken to the forefront (wearing blue here for some reason.) But when one of you win, that person then gets to play the game as if in one-player, with no way for the other to jump in and challenge, though with all the problems the game had, the person losing is really the winner in the long run. 

I have nothing else to say. You had no excuse, Tiertex, for doing a sham job like this. NO excuse!


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